Helping Worship Leaders Lead Well

Yesterday at the end of our 11:15am service, when communion was wrapping up, I made up a word. It’s a good one, and I think we should all add it to our worship vocabulary.

It came out when I was encouraging the congregation to offer words/prayers of thanksgiving and praise to God. And in my mental search for the word “exaltation” (which is indeed an actual word), I was faced with all of the different options:

1. Exalt. 2. Exalting. 3. Exalted. 4. Exaltation. 5. ExxonMobil.

And instead of using any of those existing options, I chose to make up a new one.

So something like this came out of my mouth: “Let’s offer our exaltatation to the Lord”.

That extra syllable – the addition of the “at” that don’t really need to be there – really makes that word pop in a new way. To use a classical music term: it adds umph. Or oomph if you’re from the south. In other words, the extra “at” is where it’s at.

Exaltatation. It’s harder to say, harder to spell, and harder to understand, but it’s got pizzaz written all over it. Or maybe pizza written all over it. “Make that one extra large pizza with pizzaz, please, with some exaltatation on the side.”

If I had just used the already existing word, “exaltation”, things would have gone just fine. But that extra syllable, resulting in the invention of a new word, kicked things in a different gear. I recommend you use this new word as soon as you can.